Being Green

This morning facing the late shift of classes at SVA I was able to indulge in slow coffee and breakfast, while I tried to channel a blog at the kitchen table. Half-hour later my roommate, Mimia, a talkative and generous girl from Bogota, stumbled down the steps moaning with half of her back covered in saran wrap and fluorescent green tape.

Flash backward 16 hours, I got home from work with a bottle of Riesling to mark the first day of real New York Spring heat and all its glorious and disgusting smells—as well as to ease my nerves for an impending “date.” Mimia and I chilled and split the bottle, she described her newest assignment in patternmaking and started cutting out some metallic leather to sew a clutch purse. “How do you say???” She motioned to the top of the purse where a clasp might be. I racked my brain for the official Mimia thesaurus, which always makes me question my own hold on the English language. I was half-listening half processing thoughts about that week at work.

Then I left the apartment headed to a neighborhood restaurant—one of the revolving-door establishments that seems to focus on a new kind of cuisine—Peruvian, Vietnamese, Italian, every few months. Somewhere between the wine last night and coffee this morning Mimia got a little bored, took herself out to a hipster establishment on the LES for PBRs, and then tried to find a tattoo parlor she visited last year while also drunk.

“I said, I think this is the street, but if it is not, it’s a sign that I should not get new tattoos.” This statement is completely rational. She moaned on about how the outline wasn’t thick enough and the new star on her shoulder blade wasn’t straight, and I felt as if I was displaced a few decades away wondering how I managed to hit my late twenties without a stab of ink on any part of my body. And how, perhaps luckily none of the capricious decisions I made years ago, left any visible marks.